Housing

Housing is the most important asset owned by the majority of Australian households.The Kimberley Development Commission works towards a future where the region’s housing conditions are similar to the rest of Australia. This means that the families of the region will have access to affordable housing in well-serviced and well maintained settlements delivering high standards of amenity.

Photo: Newly built house in Broome

The Commission envisions a future where housing will be predominantly privately owned, with a strong private housing market to help moderate housing prices and rents and establish a vibrant residential construction industry based on sustained demand.

It is also a goal that those families within social housing will be able to access options for transition out of social housing to take up education, employment and home ownership.

In this section we present a number of statistics on the Kimberley housing market. In the period from the 1990s until the mid 2000s, the region experienced relatively strong housing price growth in line with a significant increase in the debt-to-income ratio of Australian households. Since the mid 2000s, population growth and infrastructure projects such as the Ord Irrigation Expansion Project (Stage 2) have played an increasing role in explaining housing price growth across the region. The peak of the housing market in the Kimberley occurred in 2013, which many specialists attribute to the mining boom experienced by the State resulting in peaks in housing prices in Regional WA.

Kimberley Real Estate

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* Median Historical House prices based on rolling sales for houses only, land size range less than 1 hectare since financial year 1989/90 to financial year 2017/18 as at 30/08/2018, subject to revision. Where prices show as ‘zero’ that means no sales were conducted.

Building Approvals

Building Approval statistics are a useful tool to monitor economic activity, employment and investment in the region, for they can point to what comes next in the construction cycle, including employment in the construction sector. From July 2018 to March 2019, with the exception of the Local Government Area Wyndham-East Kimberley, all other Local Government Areas have experienced a decline in the number of building approvals, which is also in line with declining housing prices not only in the Kimberley but across Australia.